Fermata Placement

Dorico
41

Let me rephrase, then:
Dorico’s default music frames have a margin of 14.11mm between the top staff line and the frame itself. That allows for maybe a couple of lines of text, which is normally enough - maybe you have a row of chord symbols and some staff/system text. If you have a title, Dorico’s expectation is that you’ll use a text frame or a Flow Header for that.

By throwing two pieces of staff/system text, a multirest and a tempo marking at one rhythmic location, you’re giving Dorico double the number of lines the defaults are designed to cope with.

One way round that is to increase the padding (margin) at the top of the frame. This increases the top margin and Dorico can then use its collision avoidance rules to sensibly respace all of the following staves.
Another option is to put the Title in a Flow Header, which gives Dorico an extra margin to play with (and takes one of the text pieces off the top of the stave), as so:

I’m not going to engage with the “beta level” conversation any more, but I will say that I think you’re trying to use Dorico in a slightly unorthodox way, and expecting an unreasonable level of automatic magic from it.

42

I don’t wish to be disagreeable, but I believe that the issues you’re seeing are at least to some degree of your own making. As I explained in an earlier reply, if you approach things in the wrong way, then the knock-on effects can be significant. Rather than dragging all the staves around, if you increase the top music frame margin, either en masse in Layout Options or on a particular page, then you’ll find that you don’t have to deal with those knock-on effects.

We have many thousands of users who are saving time with Dorico every single day. That is not to say that we are complacent about making future improvements to the software, as is plainly clear by the pace of development and our level of engagement with our customers, but I think that this is actually one of the stronger areas of the application’s design, and it can be incredibly powerful and save a lot of time if you understand how to work with it. I daresay we need to do a better job of explaining how to work with the page layout tools, though we have put together a detailed YouTube playlist on this subject (find it here) and Lillie has been expanding the documentation about these tools as well (find that here).

I would be more than happy to take a look at your project and try to give you some pointers to working efficiently with the tools provided. I know that you are unwilling to post it here, but if you want to email it to me (at d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de) I would be pleased to take a look.

43

Meaningless irrelevance, since we don’t know who published them.

I’m outta here. This forum has an “ignore user” button.

44

The orchestral environment usually calls for exact fermata placement, so the original suggestion should be taken into consideration. I am an ochestral player, and there is always a question about where the fermata is. Lot of the time players can just wait and see what happens and make notes if the situation is simple, but if there is something happening that requires explanation, a lot of time would be saved by having the fermatas where they happen, not on a previous beat. Thus there should be an option for this (preferably default).

45

Pekka, I agree 100%. This always leads to a question and time is money.

46

I don’t understand why (if one is so concerned) you wouldn’t simply split the measure of the affected parts. For example, if there’s a fermata for a soloist on beat one, enter a quarter rest with fermatas in the other parts and then complete those measures with the appropriate number of rests. Why insist on a whole rest with fermata and then be peeved that it is centered?

47

At least for me, I don’t want the fermata just more-or-less in the right place. I force durations to use ties so that the fermata is on the same count for everyone. For anything with a quick turnaround (such as studio sessions or just about anything in the UK…) this saves needless time-wasting.

48

For anyone looking for a quick way to do this manually, here’s what I do:

  1. Apply the fermata to the correct rhythmic location.
  2. Grab a rest under the fermata, and turn on Force Duration.
  3. Copy and paste that rest to each stave that is resting, using the caret.
  4. Use U to break any held notes, either side of the fermata.
  5. Turn on Force Duration for the tie chains that now appear.
  6. Hit T to retie those tie chains.

It’s much quicker to do than to explain:

49

A rhythmic cue might look neater (and take less horizontal space) than a bunch of tied notes.
rhythmic cue.png

50

And it conveys more information (which may or may not help).

51

Thank you, pianoleo, for perfectly illustrating my point. This seems so much clearer than simply dragging a fermata about or being displeased with whole bar rests that are [correctly] centered.

FWIW, I agree with you Rob, that the cue seems a more elegant solution (at least in individual parts).

52



Just ran into the same problem. Hopefully this will be dealt with in a non to distant future together with the disappearing breath marks on tied notes after line breaks …

53

Any news regarding automatically putting rests in silent staves at the rhythmic position of the fermata? Seems like a very Doricoesque functionality. :slight_smile:

54

No.